Tag Archives: filling

Not thrilled with how my dentist appointment went yesterday. The root canal, to prepare for a crown, was first – and I ended up spending two hours in the chair. Some of that was waiting for the numbing agent to work, but a lot of that time was because she had her office overbooked – and she kept working on me a bit, leaving for a bit to work on other patients, then back to me again. She had to have done this about a half-dozen times… enough that by the end of it all the numbness was wearing off.

Now, I know that what she was doing with my tooth was difficult, and she had to use different tools and try this and that… but in my opinion, once she started working on me that should have been it. And the “rooms” are actually somewhat in the same common area, so it’s not like I can’t hear her working with someone else during the moments she was taking a break with me. And when I said “by the end” it didn’t actually mean that she completed the task. It means I had enough of the pain and the pauses and I told her to either get it wrapped up or put a temporary filling in it and I’d return at a later date when she could actually finish uninterrupted.

I honestly wouldn’t go back to her if the impression hadn’t already been taken of that tooth, and the process of shaping the tooth for the crowd having already been started. But the second dentist working there, after they numbed me up a second time, she came in and got my wisdom tooth out in about five minutes. Granted, her job was just down and dirty with much less finesse required, but I was thankful to get it done and get out of there. It was an awful sounding process… lots of cracking, breaking, digging… *shudder* I’d hate to have actually seen it from a 3rd person point of view.

My entire day after that appointment was fucked… think about two hours of having my mouth pulled this way or that way, opening as wide as I can, and then of course all of the actual trauma to my mouth. Couldn’t even close my mouth during the times where she wasn’t in the room, due to the bite guard. Felt like someone hit me with a 2×4… it kept me from falling asleep and woke me up a few times during the night once I did. So yeah, one of my worst dentist experiences by far. As soon as the crown is in and I know that I can’t be messed with, I’m gonna make sure someone hears my complaint. Take two hours on my mouth, fine, but don’t go running away so often that half of the time in that chair was spent either watching TV or micro-napping.

No updates for a while due to various circumstances. Thyroid biopsy was done a little over a week ago, which wasn’t as bad as I expected – but also more serious than I expected. 🤔👨🏻‍⚕️ Other than the doctor using a needle rather than actually cutting me open, it was actually a real deal procedure. Hooked up to monitors, in my gown, rolled from the waiting room to the procedure room… and then a couple nurses or technicians dealing with the ultrasound and instruments, while the doctor repeatedly jabbed me in the neck with a thicker-than-I’d-have-preferred needle. 😯💉 It took three different “pokes” to get enough cells for the tests that they needed to run, but the folks were all great, and always spoke in a very calming way that made it not nearly as anxiety inducing as it could have been.

Then on Monday I made it to my first of four dentist appointments. 😳 Rather than attack my whole mouf at once, they figured it would be easier on my face (and at least psychologically, on my wallet) if we split up the work on my teefs. So that appointment was a deep cleaning on the bottom, and then a gum line filling on one of the right rear molars. A little uncomfortable since they had to use a tool to push my gums down until the filling was complete, but I was good and numb so it didn’t really hurt until much later into the day.

Things have been hit and miss with my sciatic issue. Some days it’s almost unnoticeable, and then others there’s a continuous mild pain with some sharp bursts that also come with some weakness. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’ve got a followup appointment with my chiropractor in the first week of next month, and I guess I’m still gonna go see him – just so I can update him in case I have my doctor doctor contact him for my info, when I ask her to look into this problem for me through whatever avenue she thinks might help.

And then my biopsy results… they came back a day sooner than I was expecting, and I actually got the call from the specialist on my way home from the dentist. 😒 They can’t really tell you anything definite from a small sample like that, so he says surgery is in my future. 😐 I actually had an appointment with him earlier yesterday, and I left feeling about as optimistic as possible when talking about this sort of thing. Like I had already been doing myself, he pointed out many reasons that I should feel far more optimistic than the average person when it comes to this – especially noting that sometimes people have thyroid defects that grow for years and years, and are never even discovered until they’ve grown to a size where it interferes with a person’s swallowing or breathing. 😧

There’s way too much to the situation to get into real detail, but I’ll just say that his “matter of fact” way (in a good way) of talking about the surgery, the treatment, the positive results that he expects and has gotten many times before in others… it helped provide a little ease to a decidedly uneasy thing to think about. So, it’ll come, we’ll hope for the best, and if that isn’t enough, we’ll just face whatever the next thing is after that. I think that things will be fine, even if not on the first try.

I woke up early this morning so I could go up to Columbus and help Leona out with a ride to one of her appointments. No other family was available, and this particular appointment was all the way on the opposite side of town – and, without putting all her business out there, taking a bus with the unwashed masses and trying to navigate her way there while doubling the time required to do so… that just wasn’t really an option. Silver lining, it took long enough that I was able to see Cassi after she got off work, right before I had to take off to make it to my dentist appointment on time.

Two dumb birds, risking death for whatever it was they were doing.

Many dumb birds, risking death because lounging in the road is fun.

Dire-looking rollover accident near one of the bridges on the bypass.

Semi car transport jams on its brakes and smokes out all of I-70 eastbound.

How do you rear-end a car that hard on the freeway?

I’m really happy with how things went at the dentist. 🙂 My teefs aren’t in the greatest shape, but I didn’t get even a hint of “Shame on you for not taking care of your mouf!” from anyone in their office. 🙊 It was an emergency appointment, so it was strictly for my single damaged toof, but we went ahead and set up another date for a cleaning, exam, x-rays, with a little time afterwards also scheduled for the fillings I’ll likely need.

The fix that they had to do was actually at the top of one of my upper teefs, at the gum line, so I was nervous that it would be too difficult to bother saving it. 😯 But she drilled it out, the other girl carefully glopped the filler composite and hardened it layer by layer, and now you can’t even tell that it was damaged. 🤩 (I told them just to match the color that the toof is now, because it kinda just “is what it is” by this point… heh…)

Feels good to get back to a dentist to get things started again. Like I told her, I’m not worried about looking pretty, because that ship has sailed, but I’d still like to keep as many of my original teefs as possible for as long as possible. Oh, and it didn’t hurt at all during the process… but wow… once I got home and the numbness wore off… holy cow. 😣 And to top it off, the pain moved from my mouf to behind my damn eyeball. Looking forward to going to sleep tonight and being a lazy bum tomorrow.